My game hit a nasty delay—frame drops, stutters, the whole screen hitching.
It wasn't lag. It was panic—like the game hard-targeted me.
My HUD kept flashing red—no break, no letup.
WARNING: BODY FILES CORRUPTING.
DATA LEAK ACTIVE.
A sharp, static shock jolted through my small, robed frame. My health bar—a pathetic sliver of green—ticked down.
[HP: 68/375]
I clenched my busted minion staff and forced my breathing to sync with the on-screen rhythm.
Fear got loud and crowded out everything—aim, timing, common sense.
Panic meant fat-fingered clicks. Fat-fingered clicks meant getting wiped.
In this new reality, getting wiped meant no respawn.
I pressed my back against a slab of rusted iron, my hitbox barely clearing the jagged metal.
The Dregs was a junk zone—stuff that should've despawned, but didn't.
Pathing bugged into pits that barely rendered—grey fog, no depth, like a half-baked patch.
Texture seams split the walls like nobody QA'd this corner of the map.
The air tasted of copper and burning plastic, chemical exhaust from the smog that rolled through the canyon.
Then I heard it.
Thud. Drag. Thud. Drag.
Not ambience. A looping thud-drag that screamed: pay attention.
Heavy footsteps. Clean, crisp audio.
This wasn't the looped, low-bitrate scuttle of The Dregs Rats I'd farmed earlier.
This wasn't background noise. It was a spotlight sound cue—loud enough to cut through The Dregs.
I peered around the rusted metal.
A figure shoved through the chemical fog, popping in like a bad load-in—towering over the trash heaps.
He was huge—way too high-detail for this dump—like a boss got dropped into a tutorial area by mistake.
He wore a heavy, reinforced hazard shell, the corroded plating was weirdly sharp up close—grimy, high-detail. On his back, a salvage-rigged containment tank hummed with viscous runoff, pipes venting acrid steam. A makeshift crusher-gauntlet, large enough to flatten me into a decal, was locked onto his left forearm.
My HUD blew up with warnings—too much at once—like it was freaking out with me.
TARGET: The Alchemist
THREAT: EXTREME
STATUS: HUNTING
RECOMMENDATION: QUIT GAME (DISABLED)
He wasn't just walking; he was pathing with intent. His gameplay loop was simple: Search. Find. Neutralize.
He stopped a few steps away and still tracked the air—mechanical, looping—like the game was pretending he wasn't on rails.
The bandages covering his face shifted.
He was hunting anything out of place. He was hunting the glitch.
He was looking for me.
I needed to move.
Standing still was a death sentence; the Data Leak ticked like a DoT even if I was hidden.
Every few seconds, something got ripped out—chunks of my progress, chunks of my memory—leaving a hollow spot behind my ribs.
[HP: 65/375]
Something in me glitched—pain spiking so hard I wanted to tear the HUD off my screen and throw it into the fog.
I gritted my teeth.
If I stayed here, I'd rot. If I ran, he'd hear me.
I looked at the ground. The floor was a mess of "Difficult Terrain"—sludge puddles and loose scrap metal.
Normal movement would ping sound cues. Splash. Clatter.
I needed an exploit—cheap, ugly, reliable.
I focused on my movement inputs. In this game, movement is a command. You click, the unit walks.
But high-elo players know you can get picky with inputs. You can cancel the back-swing of an attack. You can interrupt a movement command with another command instantly.
Orb Walking.
Usually used for kiting enemies. Attack, move, attack, move.
But if I applied the same logic to silence?
I clicked to reposition—move. My minion legs began the animation to step forward.
Execute.
My foot touched the ground.
Stop input.
I cancelled the step before it could play the footstep sound.
Stolen novel; please report.
New Command.
Shift weight.
Stop input.
It was grueling.
It felt like trying to do a frame-perfect combo while someone counted my HP down out loud.
Step. Cancel. Step. Cancel.
I almost clipped on loose gravel, my model sliding like the ground had weird friction.
No sound.
I moved in tiny timing windows—where the game got loose.
A hitbox bug. A live glitch. I abused it to stay quiet.
The Alchemist turned his head. The green lenses of his goggles flared in the gloom.
He uncorked the flask in his hand—[Skill 1] Corrosive Miasma.
A cloud of noxious gas poured out, spreading fast and low, spreading into every crack in the ground.
Not just visuals—hard zoning.
The gas rolled right through gaps and corners, like walls didn’t matter.
I watched the cloud crawl closer.
If that touched me, the magic damage would shred my remaining HP in two ticks—fast enough I wouldn’t even have time to regret it.
Think, Alex. Think.
I had the [Passive: Toxin Filter] I’d ripped off The Dregs Rats.
It gave me immunity to "atmospheric toxins." But The Alchemist’s poison wasn't atmospheric; it was ability damage. No loopholes.
But The Dregs was a garbage dump.
It was where old junk came to despawn—and sometimes it didn't. Stuff stayed half-broken and still worked in the worst ways.
To my left, half-buried in a pile of unrendered junk, was a large, rusted cylinder.
It looked like a Sink-style Grey vent prop—some old test sector scrap that never made it out of beta.
The gas was closing in.
I broke stealth.
I scrambled—forgot the stutter-stepping entirely—and dove toward the cylinder.
Clang.
My foot hit a metal pipe. The clang was clean and loud—the kind that hard-tags your position.
The Alchemist snapped toward me.
"Want some more?" His voiceline popped—distorted and loud.
He surged forward.
[Passive] Chemical Overdrive activated, his movement speed spiked.
He barreled forward like the map was a straight speed lane.
I threw myself into the hollow cylinder of the ventilation unit.
It was tight and airless. Everything smelled like rust and hot metal.
The green gas washed over the cylinder.
[-15 HP]
[HP: 49/375]
The damage hit instantly. My vision fragmented.
Red warnings spammed my vision until the world turned into half-rendered shapes and error text—like I was stuck in a dev overlay.
Warning. HP Critical.
"Filter!" I screamed internally. "Process the damn input. Process it."
I locked onto [Toxin Filter] like it was the only button that mattered.
It was simple: toxic air equals no damage.
The Alchemist’s poison counted as ability damage, not “bad air.”
I needed to force it to count as “environmental” poison.
I needed my body to treat the gas like map stink—environment junk, not damage.
I slapped a hand on the pipe and tried to flag myself as terrain—like hard cover.
I tricked the gas into treating the pipe like sealed cover, even though it was full of holes.
I flipped it to: gas can’t get in.
The game pushed back. I wasn’t an admin—I was a minion. No permissions.
But I had the Data Leak. I was already breaking.
I felt busted at the seams—edges like my character model was cracking and the map was clipping through me.
I jammed corrupted junk into the filter—messy, risky, but it took.
[-90 MP]
I coughed, my lungs burning, but the HP bar stopped flashing red from the poison. The damage tick halted.
[Toxin Filter: Overclocked.]
[Status: Camouflaged (Environmental).]
I curled up in the pipe, shaking so hard my model jittered—like my animations were dropping frames.
Outside, the heavy footsteps stopped.
The Alchemist was right next to me.
I could hear the gurgling of volatile compounds from his rig. I could hear the heavy breathing from his idle.
He slammed his shield into the pile of junk I was hiding in.
BAM.
The pipe rang out—like a minimap ping on my head.
The pipe shook. Dust rained down on my hood.
"Gotta love the smell" he muttered.
He was about to cast Viscous Sludge—no. Just an idle loop.
But if he cast Glue, I was dead. Snared and Stuck—no movement, no excuses.
My HP ticked down again. Not from poison, but from the Leak.
[HP: 47/375]
I bit my lip hard enough it felt like my hitbox shifted—pain sharp and way too real.
I couldn't heal. I couldn't move.
I just had to wait him out—hope he didn't decide I was the target he needed to delete.
Please. Just path away. Go farm a lane.
I stared at the inner wall of the pipe. Scratches. Marks.
Wait.
My debug vision focused. The scratches weren't random textures.
They were runes—not magic. Dev graffiti. A comment.
"FIX THE HITBOX ON THIS PROP — Dev_Zero"
I almost laughed, and the sound stuck in my throat.
A dev comment burned onto the texture. This pipe really was garbage data.
The Alchemist lingered. Seconds dragged. Every beat felt like a check: move and I'm done.
My health dropped again.
[HP: 44/375]
Finally, the footsteps shifted. The heavy clank-hiss began to fade.
"Time to breathe," The Alchemist's voice drifted away, back into the fog.
I waited until the audio cues were completely gone before I dared to move.
My limbs felt heavy, my animations out of sync—like I had input delay and my body was paying the price.
The Data Leak was accelerating. The stress of it messed up my stats—made the Leak worse.
I crawled out of the pipe, gasping like my stamina bar had bottomed out.
The Dregs was quiet again, save for the distant, ambient dripping of sludge.
I looked at my hand. It was flickering. Translucent.
I could see my wireframe under my skin.
"Cleanup's coming," I whispered, and my voice sounded like it didn't believe in tomorrow.
I needed a better body—something that could hold me together without leaking.
A minion body wasn't built to carry a player mind.
I was trying to run a top-tier sim on a potato, and it was starting to melt.
I checked the HUD.
[Current HP: 41/375 | Location: The Dregs - Lower Drainage.]
Nearest Ping: 40 meters north.
A ping. A faint, pulsing signal on the minimap.
It wasn't a Prime—the kind of encounter that would delete me at full health, let alone like this. It wasn't a Minion.
It was an Item.
Items meant stats. Stats meant survival.
I gripped my broken staff and stood up.
My knees shook, but a golden path line popped up—an auto-route through the fog, like the UI trying to drive for me.
I cancelled the auto-path. I wasn't following the line anymore.
I was manual pathing, even if it got me wiped.
"Run a quick check," I muttered to the empty air. "We're not dead yet."
[HP: 41/375]
I started walking. North. Into the fog of war.
Generated by GlitchWriter.
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